My body of work, titled "Photographic Sublimes," is a visual exploration of what it means and looks like to occupy the margin. The photographs happen on the cusp of modernity, in liminal spaces which interface between the natural order and the constructed world. This liminality infiltrates every aspect of the project. The locations where I shot were neither modern nor ancient, neither peopled nor isolated. They were spaces between these two worlds, which enabled experiences of the danger, Romance, and mystery of the unknown and imagined, while maintaining some vestige of safety and the possibility of retreat at my discretion and comfort. They were, in a word, sublime. This was not a conscious choice, but it seems to have been an inevitable one.

At the same time, my technical approach was simultaneously modern and obsolete. Analog photography, it seems, is in its twilight. This project is not intended to eulogize or sentimentalize the silver emulsion, but it is nevertheless aware of the power and poignancy of the medium. Susan Sontag wrote that time inevitably renders all photography, even the worst of it, art. I was interested in this contrast between the relative obsolescence of the medium--albeit one still used enthusiastically by fine art photographers--and the patina of legitimacy it seems to afford the resulting art object. At the same time, by virtue of my practice being grounded in the present, I wanted to explore this approach to image-making in a critical and aware fashion.

There was something interesting to me about using a process that, while in the larger scheme still quite new, seems as if it is already being overtaken by the past. This, it strikes me, is the fate of all man-made objects as the curve of technological advancement becomes increasingly steep. Soon after their inception, they are either cannibalized in the name of progress or overtaken by the overgrowth of the past. This project was interested in what this process looks looks like and why one's experience of annihilation, of the perhaps imagined supremacy of nature, is ultimately an enjoyable one. I sought to create images chronicling this fascination with the liminal and the sublime, ones which sought to reimagine space and experience in their image.

This sounds like a sort of abstraction, and my technical approach was critical for helping me achieve this. I shot with a Holga, a medium-format toy camera with a plastic lens which distorts at the edges and limits the sharpness one can achieve on film. As well, the lens is unable to expose the entire image field, which results in a vignetting which lends a tunneled effect to the final prints. As I shot late at night, my exposures were necessarily long: 10-16 minutes. The long exposure is another tool of abstraction: On overcast nights the sky blows out and looks like daytime. On clear nights stars trace paths in the sky. The images often have an otherworldly cast, and viewers find it difficult to situate them as night or day photography. Insofar as this represents another liminality, I am pleased with the outcome.